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A quick heads up, before we get started. There are references to violence in this

episode that some listeners might find disturbing. You're going to be. You and I, I, people listening to this conversation, we cannot function for 24 hours without COBOL. Because it's in our smartphone, our tablet, our laptop, and our

electric.

Because it's in our smartphone, our tablet, our laptop, and our electric vehicles.

Put a little bit into a giant coffee

to put a new one thing.

Kagan. I can't. What? a giant co-free peach.

When you wake up, like I do, I'll start swiping just like you and checking how much charge I have and so on. At that very moment when you click over to social media,

there'll be a mother with a baby strapped to her back and she will be hacking at the earth under a

scalding sun without any reprieve trying to fill up a sack desperately bent over,

scrounging away, releasing toxic puffs of cobalt dust into her lungs and her baby's lungs.

Because cobalt is toxic.

And then she can eat, her baby can eat,

her children can eat, her husband can eat, whoever it is.

The family can eat that day.

And their day is measured in kilos of cobalt.

And that invariably flows up through the formal supply chain into our phones and stuff as we plug them in each day. Above the dirt where all this cobalt is located is a population of some of the poorest people on the planet. This is said hearth kara he's a professor at the University of

Nottingham in England I am a researcher on modern day slavery and child labor and author of the book

...